The present disclosure generally relates to monitoring communications for activity that violates ethical, legal, or other standards of behavior and poses risk or harm to institutions or individuals. The need for detecting violations in the behavior of representatives of an institution has become increasingly important in the context of proactive compliance, for instance. In the modern world of financial services, there are many dangers to large institutions from a compliance perspective, and the penalties for non-compliance can be substantial, both from a monetary standpoint and in terms of reputation. Financial institutions are coming under increasing pressure to quickly identify unauthorized trading, market manipulation and unethical conduct within their organization, for example, but often lack the tools to do so effectively. For many institutions, the approach to monitoring employee and customer activity is often dependent on extensive rules-based trade and transactional monitoring. These approaches may increase the cost of compliance, as labor-intensive processes are needed in order to filter through volumes of erroneous information while trying to determine activities that pose the greatest risks to the organization. In another example context, communications such as internet personal advertisements and postings are often used in the illicit sale of sexual services and trafficking of individuals. The high volume and disparate locations, and forms of postings and the inconsistent nature of the data, poses great difficulties for law enforcement in effectively detecting criminal activity.
Thus, among other needs, there exists a need for effective identification of violation conditions from electronic communications. It is with respect to these and other considerations that the various embodiments described below are presented.